


from now on, step by step

by solosis



Category: ONF (Band)
Genre: Canon Compliant, M/M, slowburn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-03
Updated: 2019-03-04
Packaged: 2019-11-08 20:26:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,204
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17987996
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/solosis/pseuds/solosis
Summary: 10 years worth of his life are spent with Hyojin by his side and Seungjoon wouldn't change a thing about it.





	1. Chapter 1

“How do you do this?”

Those are the first words Seungjoon directs at someone on his first day at school, eyes filled with eagerness and glowing as he waits for a reply. The small faced boy looks at him confused and slightly curious, looking to the sides as if he’s unsure whether he’s the one Seungjoon is talking to, so Seungjoon points at the boy’s hand and the way it balances a notebook on one finger and says it again.

“I mean how do you do this? The spinning thing!”

So – after a relative amount of pestering and whining from Seungjoon – the boy teaches him to the best of his book spinning abilities and when he leaves Seungjoon can still see his timid classmate in the back of his mind. Seungjoon recalls the way his eyes focused on him all the way through his brief exposition and then get completely absorbed in his own amusement as he watched the book continuously fall off Seungjoon’s finger and listened to his high-pitched cries.

Seungjoon forgets to ask his name so he plans to do it the following day.

 

 

(Seungjoon doesn’t need to ask for his name.

The following day the same boy tugs at his sleeve in-between classes and quietly asks if Seungjoon managed to do it – _“spinning”_ , he explains as he points at his own notebook on the table. The muscles on Seungjoon’s face fight against a barely contained grin as he proudly tells him _“I did it!”_ and pulls a notebook out of his bag. Seungjoon places it on his finger and as soon as he tries spinning it, he hopelessly watches it fall straight to the floor with a dismayed expression and a frustrated shout that makes everyone in the classroom briefly turn their heads towards him.

The other boy laughs, cackles and after Seungjoon playfully hits him once or twice he presents himself as Hyojin with a toothy smile.)

 

 

After a short while Seungjoon becomes able to spin notebooks on his finger – pens, pencils and a basketball as well ( _“I’m a fast learner!”_ , he says excitedly). Hyojin teaches him in-between classes, at their break, on their way back home and soon he has nothing more to teach. Hyojin has nothing more to teach, and yet they find out they have a whole lot of stuff to learn about each other as they naturally move on to whatever is the next step in their quickly blossoming friendship.

Seungjoon learns Hyojin is quieter than most kids in class, and in his quietness Seungjoon realizes he has a tendency for perfectionism in everything he proposes to do and is lot kinder than he cares to show. In turn, Hyojin learns (far too quickly, if he may say so) Seungjoon has too much energy for his own good; sometimes he would find a fitting outlet for it and Hyojin would watch in awe his sharp dance moves. Then there would be those times when all of his energy goes into cranking the volume of his voice all the way up and destroying the pause button, much to Hyojin’s chagrin.

Maybe that’s why, in his constant talkativeness and playing around, Seungjoon is the one who takes his hand and helps the shyer and more reserved Hyojin navigate through the daily obligatory social exchanges among classmates, like a beacon to a directionless boat. When the storm subsides and the sea calms down it takes no time for both of them to become quite well assimilated into their small classroom, passing copies of homework around and making plans for the weekend. The sky is clear, the sun shines and Seungjoon lets a happy smile spread on his lips when despite their constant bickering Hyojin still sticks by his side.

 

 

Perhaps that’s also the reason why Seungjoon ends up being the first person whom Hyojin lets hear his singing.

On an almost daily ritual, they buy a pair of soft drinks on their way home and stop by a quiet and – they guess – abandoned playground where they sit close together on a wooden bench to talk about anything that comes to them at the moment. When Seungjoon points at Hyojin's earphones and asks what he is always listening, he takes one of his earbuds and hands it to Seungjoon without a word.

The sound of the piano fills his ears followed by a familiar male voice, Hyojin turns to look at Seungjoon and his eyes shine so bright in excitement that it looks like they contain a small portion of the twinkling stars he sees in clear night skies. His equally excited voice comes out of his mouth in a quick string of words as he tells Seungjoon that album has just been released in the beginning of the year and how that singer is really amazing, that his singing somehow always manages to move him and Seungjoon is so amused at Hyojin’s reactions that the smartest comment he comes up with is:

“Hyojinie, you listen to old ladies’ songs.” when Hyojin almost pushes Seungjoon off the bench, he laughs “I’m serious! I’m sure I’ve already heard my mom listening to something like this!”

“Fine, I’ll keep these old ladies’ songs to myself then!” Hyojin protests and reaches to pull the earphone out of Seungjoon’s ear. Seungjoon stops his hand and hurriedly lets out a high pitched _“I’m just kidding! Seriously, I’m listening!”_.

Seungjoon closes his eyes and, feeling the warm sunlight against his eyelids, whistles along the song. On one side he hears the soothing voice reverberating through the earphone, with the other he catches the rustling sound of the wind blowing against the leaves of the nearby trees. He then hears a timid humming coming from his side, the humming slowly becomes whispered melodic words and then finally full singing, and that’s when his eyes snap open and his whistling stops.

Hyojin has his eyes closed as he sings and Seungjoon doesn’t know if it’s because he’s too absorbed in the song or if he’s simply too shy to face his one person audience, but he uses that chance to actually look at him. Seungjoon looks at the way Hyojin’s hand clenches into a fist on his lap in the most emotional parts of the song and how his eyes shut tight when a high pitched note comes out of his mouth; Seungjoon notices how every sung word takes shape before his eyes and wearing Hyojin’s young yet big voice they fill his chest with something he can't quite describe. Warmth wells up all over his body and when Seungjoon closes his eyes he can see some memory from a distant future: Hyojin up on a big stage under the blinding spotlights, his back turned to him as he extends his hands towards a sea of people – an overwhelming image stuck behind his eyelids and engraved into the deepest parts of his heart.

Hyojin’s silhouette glows in bright orange with the setting sun behind him, and when he lets the last note die out with an insecure look and an even more insecure _“how was it?”_ directed at Seungjoon, he can’t help but be reminded of a scene out of some old movie his older sister must’ve showed him a long time ago. Seungjoon claps excitedly, blabs incoherent praises and extends his hands for a high five with an embarrassed Hyojin.

When their hands connect momentarily, their eyes meet for a second and the world goes silent when the brief contact turns into a quick hug. A hug so quick that one could question whether that mere touching of two bodies could be counted as such, but Seungjoon feels it. He feels it in his gut that moment might as well really have been orchestrated by some higher being, a gravitational force that pulls – will definitely keep pulling – him into the orbit of Hyojin’s life.


	2. Chapter 2

For quite a while Seungjoon thought of Hyojin as the cool guy who could do anything, what with the way he’s all smart, responsible and has girls fawning over him and asking Seungjoon what Hyojin would like to get on his birthday. So when Hyojin casually tells him he wants to be a singer in the future one summer night Seungjoon sleepovers at his place, he takes that as something already granted by whatever god above them and regards his following question as a simple sign of polite curiosity.

“What about you?”

Seungjoon is sprawled on the cold floor with his eyes closed and muscles languid, his brain takes a minute or two to pick up the pace the moment he hears Hyojin’s question and the pause in the flipping pages of the magazine he has in hands. Seungjoon traces back to a not so distant past, he lists the things he knows how to do and the things he wants to do and doesn’t find much of any of them. 

“I guess… a professional table tennis player? Actually, I’m not really sure. My mom once took me to a school where I could get proper training, but then I would have to stay at a dorm, the coach was scary and everyone seemed too serious…”, he hums and starts again in a slow and whimsical rhythm “I still play it for fun and I’m good at it, so maybe later on I’ll try to seriously get into it.” 

“If you’re putting it off that much, doesn’t that mean you don’t really want it?”, Hyojin’s answer is blunt and Seungjoon is so taken aback that he sits up and opens his eyes to properly look at him.

“Why are you asking me this in the first place? Sorry I didn’t plan so far ahead like some people here, I’ll think about it when I get there.”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to sound... like that.” Hyojin quickly says with almost pleading eyes as he feels the defensive tone in Seungjoon’s voice –  _ “whatever ‘like that’ means” _ , Seungjoon thinks with a scoff. Then Hyojin pauses, stops flipping the pages once again and averts his gaze from anywhere near Seungjoon. When he opens his mouth to speak again, his words escape through a strainer and all that’s left in Hyojin’s grasp is something that only resembles a coherent sentence.

“I... I was just wondering you know… We had that assignment to send a letter to ourselves in the future”  _ did they? _ , Seungjoon must have skipped that one “And I know it’s weird and silly thinking seriously about stuff like that, but it’s just… I ended up wondering what we’ll be doing ten years from now. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have put it that way. Like you should have an answer ready for me and I don’t even know why I’m talking about this- I guess I’m just a little tired.”

Seungjoon’s gaze softens at Hyojin’s stuttered words and defeated half-laugh/half-sigh when he stops talking; his annoyance vanishes because in the  _ “we” _ Hyojin utters Seungjoon surely hears an  _ “I” _ . And that’s new territory to Seungjoon, one he isn’t quite sure he’s ready to venture into yet but knows he must do it anyway. So he waits for Hyojin to look at him and digs deep for an answer with no success. Should he tell a joke? Say meaningless cliche words?

Seungjoon comes to terms with the fact that thinking is not his forte. And when he watches Hyojin keeping his head down and his hands clenching the magazine a little tighter, he finds that perhaps the answer is not thinking at all. So Seungjoon gets up swiftly and goes towards the bed, making it sink under the weight of both of them when he jumps on Hyojin’s back with a shout and lies on top of him. When Hyojin turns his head to look at Seungjoon with a startled expression, Seungjoon smiles.

“You’ll have already become a real famous singer by then. I’ll brag about you to everyone, sell your autographs and embarrassing childhood stories – like that one time juice came out of your nose when you snorted at some stupid joke. I’ll point at some music program being broadcast on the television and say  _ ‘ _ hey, that’s my friend Kim Hyojin and he’s actually a loser!’”

Hyojin smiles –  _ “What a good friend you are” _ – and lets his head rest against the pillow under him.

“A singer, huh?” Hyojin pauses and chooses his words before looking at Seungjoon once again, still smiling “You should go into the show biz too, Seungjoon-ah. Since you are good at dancing and has no shame at all.” 

“Wow, I don’t know if you’re complimenting or offending me.” Seungjoon smiles again and tilts his head to the side, Hyojin can feel the rumbling of his chest when he hums in thought and then starts speaking again in a softer voice this time “So Hyojinie and me as performers, huh? You’d be a singer and I’d be a dancer or something like that? We would have so much fun together, wouldn’t we? I’m sure of it.”

Hyojin moves in a way that pushes Seungjoon off his back. Seungjoon expects hitting the floor before noticing he’s still on the bed – the soft mattress under him and the cool wall against his back –, face to face with Hyojin who keeps a small smile on his lips as he pats Seungjoon’s side and tells him to turn off the lightswitch behind him so they can sleep. Seungjoon thinks of telling Hyojin he can go back to the floor, that it’s too hot for them to be sharing a bed or that they’d wake up with a terrible backache in the morning, but then a small nagging voice echoes inside his head and convinces him it would be too much trouble.

Seungjoon turns off the light and mouths a quiet “good night” at Hyojin’s back.

  
  


Seungjoon can’t sleep.

He tosses and turns in rhythm with the ticking of the clock and Hyojin’s even breathing beside him as they share the cramped space of a single bed. Seungjoon lies on his side and tries figuring out the shape of Hyojin’s face in the dark, getting his eyes used to the lack of light. Seungjoon traces Hyojin’s lines with his eyes and files them in his memory one by one as the words they’ve just exchanged repeat themselves in his ears.

In his head he tries to calculate again and again how many times the clock would tick in a period of ten years, the numbers increasing in equal measure to the possibilities the future holds for him. But again, thinking isn’t his forte, so Seungjoon just tries to picture what he would look like in ten years, what he would be doing, people he would meet. In the end a blank fills the space between the 13 years old and the 23 years old version of himself.

There are very few things that are certain in his future. The following day he will take a morning stroll with Hyojin, then they’ll have lunch at his place and go out again to ride their bicycles by the river. Of some other things he’s not that certain, like whether they are going to sing at a karaoke or play basketball after that, or perhaps they’re just going to buy snacks and watch some movie back at Hyojin’s place. When the sun sets and the moon is almost visible in the sky, they’ll wave goodbye to each other and to another day, they’ll go back home and then wait for the sun to rise when they would meet once again.

After that the possibilities expand and multiply infinitely until Seungjoon is unable to see their end – they go beyond the horizon line, a place where Seungjoon’s eyes are unable to reach and his mind unable to imagine. And yet, in the quiet of Hyojin’s bedroom, he somehow finds that in each and every one of them Hyojin shows up as the one constant in the raging waves of the never ending changes life would surely reveal itself to be. Seungjoon can’t tell the exact point in time it happens, but on that hot summer night, with his body covered in a thin layer of sweat and his heart beating just a little bit faster, he notices that whenever he looks to his side he can find Hyojin there.

  
  


(And when he finally closes his eyes and feels the sleep hitting every part of his body, Seungjoon thinks Hyojin’s idea might not be bad at all.)

  
  


Seungjoon asks Hyojin to teach him how to sing and Hyojin, stifling a gleeful smile, says he’ll do it if Seungjoon teaches him how to dance.

It takes a while for them to get something actually done on the initial days, the reason being they are still too much of children even when they try denying it to all the adults around them. Hyojin tries to muffle a snort when Seungjoon hits all the wrong notes of some ballad he picks for him while Seungjoon falls straight to the floor cackling when Hyojin keeps tripping on his own feet. Mornings and afternoons stretch in between the echoing of squeaky sounds of sneakers moving against the floor and the humming of a familiar song as they share a soft drink after one more practice session. Days pass until the seconds, minutes, hours they spend together are filled more with singing and dancing than the usual playing around that had become their trademark by then. 

Seasons pass in a flash and they find themselves riding their bicycles home against the pink-orange hue and the low hanging clouds in an endless succession of repeating days. The comfortable silence they’ve been growing accustomed to fills the distance in-between the two of them, only the sounds of their pedaling and the words that quietly swim inside their heads are present when they go up a steep hill.

Maybe it’s the effect of the exhaustion on his limbs and soreness on his throat that make Seungjoon consider his next words.

Maybe it’s just the intense and genuine curiosity about Hyojin’s reaction that makes Seungjoon call out to him.

Maybe it’s the foreign nostalgic feeling that constricts his chest whenever he watches Hyojin’s back who always rides slightly ahead of him that makes Seungjoon gather up his courage and ask him in a confident voice.

“So when do we start auditioning?”

Seungjoon’s words finally stop Hyojin in his tracks and make him turn in his direction. Perhaps they also stop space and time as everything seems frozen in place – the wind and the river, Hyojin’s facial features and Seungjoon’s feelings. In that split second when the universe seems to be at a standstill, Seungjoon can’t read the meaning behind Hyojin’s blank expression, but when everything starts moving again and the edges of his mouth curve up in a bright smile and his eyes glow in the purest form of happiness he’s ever witnessed, Seungjoon guesses that reaction is good enough.

They are side by side when they start riding their bicycles again and while the bright red of the sunset masks the slight flush that creeps up the tip of Seungjoon’s ears, it can’t hide the way his smile shines and reflects Hyojin’s own. 


End file.
